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P a g e | 444444 “Nightmare Horrors and Perils of the Night”: Zombies and Modern Science Kristine Larsen Science (so noble in origin and original purpose) has produced in alliance with sin nightmare horrors and perils of the night before which giants and demons grow pale .1 – J.R.R. Tolkien In the second half of the twentieth century, the zombie has increasingly become the poster child for the collection of cinematic monsters that have captivated the imaginations of film directors and their audiences. From multiple encyclopaedic compendia and myriad graduate student theses to articles in The Economist , Popular Mechanics , and Newsweek , popular culture pundits and academics from across the disciplines are pondering the increasing popularity of these unlikely cinematic darlings. Zombies are devoid of social skills, aesthetic properties, and basic hygiene. They lack the eroticism of the vampire, and never ask their victims if they want to be “turned”. Rather, they are usually portrayed as part of a mindless, marauding hoard driven by the single-minded primeval urge to feed on human flesh. But this has not always been the cinematic vision of the undead. In the first few decades of the zombie’s film history, it was still recognizable as human, a silent, lumbering slave who often menaced rather than killed, and would never think (if they thought at all) of eating their victims. These early cinematic zombies were created using some semblance of traditional Haitian rituals, and even if their creator was a scientist, science had very little to do with it. Then the world changed. On 16 July 1945, American scientists tested the first nuclear bomb, and less than a month later used this terrifying weapon on Japanese civilians in order to end World War II. At that first test in Alamogordo, New Mexico, lead physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer recalled a quotation from the Hindu scripture, 1 Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson, Tolkien on Fairy-stories (London: Harper Collins, 2008), p.269. The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 12 (Summer 2013) P a g e | 454545 The Bhagavad Gita : “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”2 While Oppenheimer later admitted that he was “a little scared of what I had made”, 3 and tried (in vain) along with many of his Manhattan Project colleagues to prevent the development of the even more destructive hydrogen “super” bomb, he hid behind the party line of scientists in claiming that he (and they) could not be held accountable for the misuse of their discoveries. “If you are a scientist,” he argued, “you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world….” 4 Some scientists may earnestly believe that the situation is so clearly black and white, but as the arts have shown us, the world is filled with fascinating shades of grey. Science does not exist in a vacuum; rather, it is the vocation of scientists , who, as humans, are certainly not infallible. While, as Tolkien noted, the goal of science may be noble in principle, scientists as individuals cannot be expected to be any nobler than the general public, especially when their funding is provided by large military complexes or global corporations (whose motivations are certainly considered less than noble in the eyes of the general public). Enter the stereotype of the mad scientist, overstepping the bounds of what is “natural” and falling into the trap of “playing God”. Since the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818, some in the general public have looked at the scientific establishment with suspicious eyes. Modern marvels such as genetic engineering, nuclear energy, and nanotechnology only further their mistrust of science, as they see the modern equivalent of a genie released from its bottle with little thought as to the possible outcomes. A significant percentage of the general public worries, based on what surveys demonstrate is an incomplete understanding of the basic science, 5 if the Large Hadron Collider will create a black hole that could destroy the earth. They question why the U.S. military stockpiles smallpox and anthrax in high security laboratories, and question the wisdom of changing the genetic structure of bacteria, crops, and livestock. It appears that with each scientific advance 2 “J. Robert Oppenheimer Interview”, A.J. Software and Multimedia , http://www.atomicarchive.com/Movies/Movie8.shtml, accessed 3 January 2011. 3 Gerard J. De Groot, The Bomb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p.112. 4 Ibid. 5 The National Science Board has been tracking the public’s attitudes towards and knowledge of science for several decades. Science and Engineering Indicators: 2010 can be found at http://www.nsf.gov.statistics/seind10. The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 12 (Summer 2013) P a g e | 464646 there seems to be yet another theoretical opportunity for the world to destroy itself, whether through nuclear holocaust, pandemic, or deadly material returned to our planet through some space mission. The modern zombie can therefore be thought of as the bastard child of science, a metaphor for the horrors – both real and perceived – that may unintentionally befall humanity as a result of cutting-edge scientific research. The methods of zombification portrayed in films in recent decades reflect the general public’s fears about what many believe modern science has (or has the potential to) become, especially in partnerships with military and corporate institutions – the so-called “military industrial complex”. This essay will explore examples of some of the most widely-used “scientific” causes of zombification, and illustrate how these films reflect real-world concerns of science and ethics. The number of zombie films which feature archetypal mad scientists is legion. Two representative examples separated by six decades are The Walking Dead (1936) and House of the Dead (2003). In the former, Boris Karloff stars as an executed prisoner who is resurrected by an unscrupulous scientist obsessed with the secrets of life and death. The more recent film centres on college students who attend an ill- fated rave on a mysterious island and become the prisoners of an evil scientist who has developed an immortality serum which he has not only used on himself, but also has used to create zombies. Some works openly embrace the Frankenstein comparison, as in the case of George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985), where the mentally unbalanced scientist Dr. Logan is openly referred to as “Frankenstein” by both his fellow scientists and the military personnel sharing their bunker. In Robin Becker’s 2010 novel Brains: a Zombie Memoir , the scientist who develops the zombie-creating biochemical agent is named Dr. Howard Stein. Former English professor-turned-zombie Dr. Jack Barnes refers to Stein as “my creator. Our father, Mad Scientist Extraordinaire. God in the Garden of Evil.” 6 Like Shelley’s protagonist, Howard Stein spurns his creation, explaining to Jack that he and the other still- cognisant zombies are “a mistake. Something out of Frankenstein .” 7 Perhaps the most (in)famous mad scientist of zombie films is Herbert West of the Re-animator series. Loosely based on a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, the original film introduced audiences to the megalomaniac young scientist West and his glow-in- 6 Robin Becker, Brains: A Zombie Memoir (New York: Eos, 2010), p.4. 7 Becker, Brains , p.178. The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 12 (Summer 2013) P a g e | 474747 the-dark green reanimating reagent. With a complete disregard for both the ethical mores of the medical establishment and the Miskatonic Medical School student handbook, West conducts his reanimation experiments on both animals and humans – seen by him as simply objects on which to test his serum – without seeming concern for either the wishes of those experimented on or the unpredictable and unstable results of these experiments. “I’ve conquered brain death,” he boasts to roommate and fellow medical student Dan Cain. “We can defeat death. We can even achieve every doctor’s dream and live lifetimes.” 8 While it can be debated whether or not West was right about physicians’ aspirations, the viewer can certainly interpret the film as a cautionary tale against unrestricted, profit-driven medical research, especially such experiments in which the unwilling participants have not given their informed expressed consent. In Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic , Linda Bradley sees Re-animator and similar works from the 1980s as reflecting not only on the objectification but the intentional commoditisation of the human body, both as a whole and as a semblance of pieces. For example, in Re-animator West injects the head and decapitated corpse of rival scientist Hill, noting with enthusiasm “Yes, parts. I’ve never done whole parts.” 9 In The Return of the Living Dead (1985) the reanimating gas causes individual body parts and dogs sliced in half for medical school demonstrations to move on their own. In Bradley’s words, “the horror and the real monster had become the body itself.” 10 The zombie horrifies us not only because it wants to eat our flesh, but because it violates the presumed sanctity of the body, and robs us of the promise of a peace after death – so much for “rest in peace”. In the early scenes of Dawn of the Dead , corpses are not objectified, but initially humanised, given last rites and covered in shrouds before being locked into a low-income housing unit’s basement storage cage, despite the fact that the next-of-kin know what their family members will become.